Systems and methods of objective video quality measurement are known that employ a full-reference approach, a reduced-reference approach, or a no-reference approach. With regard to the full-reference approach to objective video quality measurement, information from target video content (also referred to herein as a/the “target video”) is typically compared to corresponding information from a reference version of the target video (also referred to herein as a/the “reference video”) to provide a measurement of the perceptual quality of the target video. For example, such information from the target video, and such corresponding information from the reference video, can include a number of characteristics of the respective videos, such as their spectral components, their variations in energy levels, their energy distributions in the frequency domain, etc., any of which may be sensitive to degradation during processing and/or transmission of the respective videos. In such systems and methods that employ a full-reference approach to objective video quality measurement, it is generally assumed that the systems and methods have full access to all of the information from the reference video for comparison to the target video information. However, transmitting all of the information from the reference video over a network for comparison to the target video information at an endpoint, such as a mobile phone or other mobile device, can consume an undesirably excessive amount of network bandwidth. Accordingly, such a full-reference approach to objective video quality measurement is generally considered to be impractical for use in measuring the perceptual quality of a target video at such an endpoint mobile device.
With regard to the reduced-reference approach to objective video quality measurement, information from the target video is typically compared to a reduced amount of corresponding information from the reference video to provide a measurement of the perceptual quality of the target video. In cases where the perceptual quality of the target video is measured at an endpoint, such as a mobile phone or other mobile device, the reduced-reference approach to objective video quality measurement allows a reduced amount of information from the reference video to be transmitted over a network for comparison to the target video information at the endpoint mobile device, thereby reducing the amount of network bandwidth consumed during such transmission.
With regard to the no-reference approach to objective video quality measurement, it is generally assumed that no information from any reference video is available for comparison to the target video information. Accordingly, such systems and methods that employ a no-reference approach to objective video quality measurement typically provide measurements of the perceptual quality of a target video using only the information from the target video.
In the full-reference approach, the reduced-reference approach, and the no-reference approach to objective video quality measurement described above, prior attempts have been made to build video quality models that conform approximately to the human visual system (also referred to herein as an/the “HVS”). For example, information from a target video, as well as corresponding information from a reference video, can pertain to one or more features of the target video (such features also referred to herein as a/the “target features”) and one or more features of the reference video (such features also referred to herein as a/the “reference features”), respectively. Further, the full-reference approach, the reduced-reference approach, and the no-reference approach to objective video quality measurement can each employ one or more functions involving the target features and/or the reference features to model video quality. However, such prior attempts to build video quality models that conform approximately to the HVS have met with difficulty, because, for example, the HVS is highly complex and generally not well understood.
It would therefore be desirable to have improved systems and methods of objective video quality measurement that avoid at least some of the drawbacks of the various known objective video quality measurement systems and methods described above.